Upon meeting someone, one of my go-to questions is, “What’s your favorite movie?” If my potential new friend doesn’t freeze, overwhelmed with the more than 500,000 choices in existence, based on their answer, I can get a pretty good feel for who they are.

The person who picks Gone with the Wind differs greatly from the one selecting Zombie Strippers. Does this mean one becomes my bestie while I kick the other to the curb? Certainly not! Might I have to work a bit harder to connect with one compared to the other? Most definitely, but I won’t hold their choice of Gone with the Wind against them. Sure, Scarlett is a terribly selfish person, and the movie drags on forever with a rare reprieve of her throwing up after eating radishes, and you’re like, “Yeah, doofus, you deserve that!” But I won’t split hairs.

Gone with the Wind is considered a cinematic classic, but I want the time back I spent watching it. My wife loves Castaway, but beyond the use of the line, “I have made fire,” it mostly gets a meh from me. I’ve never seen the Godfather series or Heat, but I love This is Spinal Tap and Stranger than Fiction. Casablanca and Singin’ in the Rain are incredible, and I adore It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Art speaks to people, and discovering which specific piece speaks to someone reveals much about that person. Paintings aren’t widely distributed, and music is so accessible, when someone shares a favorite musician, my typical response is, “Who?”

That’s why movies are so great. Yeah, the market’s saturated with them, but because of their length and distribution, it limits our choices, which means we as a culture have a common vocabulary. Most everyone has Amazon Prime or Netflix, and even after traveling across the country, I found people looking forward to the latest release in the Fast and Furious series just like others back home.

For the most part, critics and audiences agree on which movies are worth seeing, and over time, certain movies will ascend the ladder of opinion to become considered classics. Therefore, if culture decides which movies are good, what about terrible movies? I’m not talking about cinematic masterpieces I just don’t understand. I’m talking about the ones critics rake over the coals or that bomb at the box office but are still loved years later — cult classics.

All over the country, fans dress up and fill theaters to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Room year after year, reveling in all the aspects one would normally cite for making them bad movies, whether it be poor acting, terrible dialogue, low production value, etc.

Watching them, one’s brain struggles to comprehend how something so awful in so many ways actually exists. They’re so bad, these trash movies take on a mythic quality, because surviving suffering appeals to us. Eating spicy food or sucking sour candy is an unpleasant experience, yet we breed spicier peppers and up the levels of sourness because people can’t help themselves. These car accidents of cinema fascinate us with their mangled scripts, and we wonder if the careers of those involved made it out alive, but we drive away with a sense of relief knowing we weren’t involved.

You know how in the Producers, Bialystock and Bloom set out to put on the worst play ever, a guaranteed flop, so they can raise too much money for it and when it fails, profit? To that end, they do everything they can to ensure the awfulness of their endeavor, but it all backfires when instead of them creating a tragedy, audiences perceive it as a comedy, loving it. That audience’s reaction is the phenomena I’m talking about with these films. Not many set out to make terrible movies, Johnny Depp notwithstanding; however, terrible movies keep showing up in theaters. Did you see the Emoji Movie? Neither did I.

Terrible movies abound so much so that Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax, experiences where the audience watches a terrible movie but laughs all the way through because of the comedic commentary dubbed over the film’s soundtrack, are popular enough to provide their creators a good living. Sharknado (You know the movie where sharks get carried by a tornado up onto land so no one is safe?) has produced four sequels. Four! People can’t get enough, and neither can I.

Just in the past couple weeks, I’ve seen Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and The Dark Tower in theaters with friends knowing reviews weren’t good. In both cases, the critics were correct, but I enjoyed these movies flaws and all. John Carter ranks up there as one of my favorite bad movies, and I don’t even know why I love it.

My all time favorite terrible movie, though, is Flash Gordon. Yeah, the one with a ridiculous plot, terrible acting, weird choices in costuming and set decoration, bird men, Timothy Dalton, and an ending still left unresolved nearly 40 years later all set to a soundtrack provided by Queen.

Network execs showed that movie on broadcast television throughout my childhood often enough I fell in love with it. Some random Saturday afternoon, my father or I would be flipping through our five channels, there it would be, and there our flipping would stop. I love it even though I never saw the beginning until getting the movie on Blu-Ray a few years back.

Dare I say it? Along with reruns of the original Star Trek and multiple viewings of the Star Wars movies, Flash Gordon helped form my entertainment palate, God help me; I’m a sucker for sci-fi.

There you have it. All this to confess I love a terrible film. Yes, I lost count of how many times I’ve seen Flash Gordon. Yes, I’ll probably watch it again soon. How could I not?

I’ll even bet there’s a terrible movie out there you love. You know, the one you’ve been thinking about as you’ve read this.

Do me a favor and watch it again.

Revel in it like you do when a stench assails your nostrils, almost causing you to retch, but then you take a second whiff to give yourself a bit of a thrill.

Better yet, watch that terrible movie with someone you love who has yet to see it. Show them who you are, scars and all.

Lying across the room on his play mat, eight-month-old Asher groaned then coughed in threat of a full-on cry before I looked over to discover him on his stomach staring at me. Catching my attention, blue eyes fixed firmly on mine, he went silent, leaned his weight onto his right arm, lifted his left, and opened and closed his free hand, waving at me. I responded in kind, and a huge grin split his face before he returned to drooling on his toys. I don’t know what I did to earn that moment and cannot imagine a trial great enough to win the prize of my son waving and smiling at me. Children are mysteries, startling in their creativity and surprising in their development. The responsibility of caring for them is an everyday encounter with pure grace, the glowing material from which fatherhood is forged.

Finding my identity changed by this role as daddy, I began to wonder about the lessons I intentionally and unintentionally end up teaching my kids. I question whether or not I help build a character in them of which I can be proud or if I’ll one day find myself wincing at the things they say, the way they dress, the goals they pursue, or the company they keep. I’ve known friends whose fathers left abruptly, and I’ve encountered those whose daddies abused them in word and deed, devastating emotions and marring what could have been their greatest work. Whether I intend to or not, I base the way I treat my children upon the way Dad treated me, which he based on how his father treated him, continuing back, perhaps, through many generations.

What if fatherhood was a physical place one could visit, a factory one could tour to see how dads influence their children? There we could witness each successive generation of men instilling their knowledge and experience to the next while tracing our own forging, seeing how much of our father’s programming found its way into us.

I imagine entering the factory doors to reveal the tour guide standing in the foyer with hand extended, greeting me with: “Glad you could come out today. You’re a recent hire, aren’t you?”

“I am. I’ve been with the company a little over four years now.”

The two of us make small talk as he outfits me with a hard hat, safety glasses, and a sky blue overcoat identifying me as a visitor. The receptionist smiles sweetly behind her desk as I follow my guide down the hall and through the heavy metal doors opening onto a caution yellow catwalk overlooking the factory floor. The sheer enormity of the place strikes me dumb; huge machines monitored by thousands of workers produce so much clamor I clamp my hands over my ears to shut it out. Sheepishly, my companion points to the foam buds peeking out of his ears and taps the left pocket of my overcoat. Soon the overwhelming noise is reduced to a low hum as we begin the tour.

Fifty feet below me, the assembly lines begin. Fed by several conveyors extending through the walls along with a multitude of vents descending from the ceiling, a row of massive, two story metal monoliths stretches so far in either direction, there is no visible end to them. Glowing rivulets of molten grace stream slowly from within them down twisting channels, the raw ingredients shining in purity, ready to be shaped for use.

My guide stops at Viewing Station 1, and my gaze travels down to the factory floor to capture the seminal moment — the production process that sets this factory apart. The raw material, molded and cooled, has been shaped to form a baby boy. His father, Glenn, is there to hold him for the first time, his blue eyes locked onto his son, a wisp of beard clinging to his firm chin, his face young and smiling. This is the moment where a tender bond is formed only to be hardened further down the line. Heart in my throat, I continue the tour.

At the next station, Glenn’s farm-roughened hands pin on a cloth diaper as he coos quietly with his new-forged link. Down the line, he gets up in the night to quiet a cry he can’t explain, holding, rocking, singing to his child. The factory stills itself, straining to hear the song, but Glenn sings low, his bass notes flowing over his son and onto the floor to be swept up later.

My guide removes his earplugs to explain each assembly line is different. “Not every product is sung to by their father in the night. Each employee decides what work he will perform, what he will add to his son’s life.”

The cries still as Glenn continues to sing. The baby boy I imagine myself to have been yawns with his whole body, arms and legs cocked at disparate angles before he nestles his head into the crook of his father’s arm, twitching in dream before we move on.

At 34 years of age, I don’t remember my father caring for me in the night, but my brain is packed with memories of family gatherings, birthday parties, picnics at the park, and Dad making dinner for us on the grill. My father stood up for me if threatened, and I feared his anger, hiding upstairs whenever he and Mom raised their voices. I knew the comfort of his lap as he read to me before bed and the strength of his arms as he wrestled and tickled with me on the living room floor. He held me accountable for the decisions I made, encouraging me to read as much as I could, to never stop learning, and disciplined me when I shirked my duty of mowing the front lawn by making me rake up the entire yard’s clippings one hot July afternoon.

My mother characterizes Dad as “steadfast, kind, faithful, a man of great integrity. Concerned more for his family than for himself, a great Christian – he tries to do the best that he can. I love him very much. He loves us very much. He was very concerned about how you were raised and making sure that you and Chris were good, Christian people and had integrity in your own life, but loved Jesus more than anything else. He’s always saying how blessed we are because you two turned out so well not because of your accomplishments but because of who you are and your characters. He’s always telling me, ‘Honey, we’re so blessed.’”

I want to be able to say that about my own kids. When they’re grown and out of the house, I want to look back at the job I did with a full heart, thankful for the way Maggie and Asher turned out, but how do I emulate my father without being him? How do I access his work log from my imaginary factory to see exactly how many hours he invested in forging my character so I can be sure to do the same for my kids? And how do I know the investment he made in me and my sister beyond time spent? How do I recognize the type of parent he was? What percentage was encouragement, and how much of it was discipline? How many jokes did he tell, and how much praying for us did he do? How many times did he wipe my butt and dry my tears? How many bandages did he apply to my scraped knees and my hurt pride?

As I pose these questions, a pool of anxiety spreads like oil in my gut. There’s so much I don’t know about being a father. No physical record exists of the hours and type of work Glenn Lees did for me. All I have is who he is, the tenets of his beliefs, and the memories of how he cared for us, but I fear that won’t be enough.

Upon meeting Dad for the first time, strangers have to work hard to get him to talk to them, because like a boulder in a streambed, he allows conversations to flow about him while he remains steadfast and still. Dad’s afraid of being negatively noticedand hates change because he doesn’t want to make a mistake. Growing up, Dad retreated to protect himself as Uncle David was loud and domineering, but when they sit down together now, they talk for hours about the price of corn and other farming matters. If you bring up something that interests Dad, like the woodworking he does in the basement, the teardrop camping trailer he’s building in the garage, and the stories of God’s interventions in his life, he opens right up. To kick-start a conversation, inquire about the machinery he installs and repairs at the wastewater treatment plant or ask him what’s been going on in politics.

While Dad sits quiet, keeping his own company and pondering things internally, I talk through things to reason them out and strike up conversations with complete strangers despite Laura’s groans of protest. Because of this, Dad’s silence seems to hang in space between me and the answers I seek. If I want to know what he’s thinking or feeling, I ask Mom, the mediator between my father and I, a role she’s played for as long as I can remember, but I don’t want to have to go to Mom or guess what my father’s thinking anymore, nor do I want my inquiries rebuffed by him as trivial or too personal. I want him to speak to me about important matters. I want to know how he feels about being a grandfather and his mother’s declining health. I want to know how Grandpa’s accident affected him, but I’m afraid if I ask, all the pain of it will bubble up to the surface, hurting Dad all over again. There’s no bad blood between him and me, just a lifetime of little communication.

When approaching my wedding night with the level of excitement only a 26-year-old virgin can muster, I asked Dad if he had any advice to share. I wasn’t looking for him to provide step-by-step instructions; I just wanted to have my father speak to me heart-to-heart, to impart wisdom. His response? “You’ll figure it out.”

Thankfully, Laura and I did just that, but I feel as though I’ve had to figure out multiple life lessons minus Dad’s input, adding to my sense of isolation and increasing my nerdiness. Instead of his being a formula to help determine the unknowns of life, he himself is an unknown, a constant with fixed values, which I have to solve.

When faced with a situation that’s new, like transitioning to a different job or Grandpa falling off the roof of his grain bin, Dad retreats. He does what needs to be done, but does it as quickly as possible like the first time a kid has to remove a hook from a freshly caught fish. Witnessing my father’s reactions programmed me to allow tough situations to intimidate me. If he, my symbol of strength, balked at visiting his hospitalized father, who was I to handle it any differently? When under duress, Dad tends to sleep as an escape, while I find a new narrative in which to lose myself. Seeing Dad lacking confidence to handle life germinated in me the thought that I wasn’t up to the challenge either, exacerbating my procrastination.

I don’t know what it was like for Dad to lose his father to slipped footing, a gravel driveway 16 feet below, and a serious brain injury. Grandpa was never the same after he fell off the roof of the grain bin: blinded, bedridden, and capable only of short conversations where each reply ended in drawn out laughter. Dad claims his father died in 1988, the year of his accident, not when Grandpa actually passed away in 2002. Dad losing Grandpa is the elephant of which I avoid speaking even now 25 years after the fact. For so many years, Dad couldn’t speak of it without pain in his voice; maybe that’s what started my nightmares.

I know Dad’s silence and distance are part of who he is. I may not like those portions of his personality, but who doesn’t have flaws? God graced me with a father that loved me unconditionally, and Dad’s core, tempered by physical, emotional, and financial hardship, is resilient and worthy of trust. When he leaves his employment at the Fatherhood Factory, passing from this earth, I hope his work in me will be proven worthy and that I continue that work in my own children with only one caveat, that my kids will find me a ready conversation partner.

If I’ve told that Sith once, I’ve told him a thousand times to not leave his mask lying around. I get that he feels claustrophobic behind that thing, anybody would, but his asthma gets to be a real problem without that mask.

That’s it, I’m sending him to his pod!

My son knows who Darth Vader is. Asher is three years old, and he knows who Darth Vader is. Well, not really. Whenever he pushes the button on the side of the mask and James Earl Jones announces, “I find your lack of faith disturbing,” Asher laughs, repeating what he hears, “I find your face is dirty.”

My son isn’t the only one who has a thin grasp on Vader mythology. My cousin shared how his boys got into a debate at school over whether or not Darth Vader died, and Mark educated them by pulling up the climactic scene from Return of the Jedi where Vader laid down his life to save Luke. Mark and I joked about how he now has to further spoil the original trilogy for his sons by showing them the scene when Vader tells Luke, “I am your Father,” or when Luke realizes he’s Leia’s brother.

Having grown up sleeping on Star Wars bedsheets and playing with pretty much all the original action figures and playsets, Mark had to do something. He tried years ago to sit with his sons and watch Star Wars, but the boys were too young and had too much energy to make it through even the first film. As a teenager, Mark collected the toys that came out in connection to the prequels, and his entire family has pre-purchased around 20 tickets to see the Force Awakens together.

Tickets in hand, Mark’s inviting his three sons to experience a cultural milestone, and he doesn’t want them missing out on the full experience, so he plans on watching at least the original trilogy as a family in the next few weeks.

What is it about Star Wars that has people clamoring to see the new movie?

It’s about hope.

Upon its release in 1977, Star Wars: A New Hope revitalized the sci-fi genre. Audiences were used to seeing dystopian futures on film such as prior years’ Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, Westworld, Rollerball, and the Planet of the Apes series.

Watergate disenchanted the American public, breaking our faith in an infallible President. If we couldn’t believe our elected officials held our best interests, what future could we expect? So we wallowed in stories confirming our worst fears until Star Wars showed us something different: even the poorest orphan has the power to face down the unknown. Light will overcome darkness. We are not alone; the Force is with us.

There is hope.

We wanted to hear that story of hope again with Episodes I, II, and III of the Star Wars franchise, especially after the events of September 11, 2001, but were sadly disappointed to see computer-generated, digitally-shot stories about how the future was set in stone and things will go wrong despite the best efforts of the most powerful Jedi.

Especially after the Paris attacks and shootings in schools and ISIS and violence and murder and rape, we want to hear that it’s going to be okay. We want to have hope for the future. We want to place our faith in the fact that we are not alone in this world, that even the poorest orphan has the power to overcome the unknown. I want to know that I’m going to make it, that my uncle facing radiation and chemotherapy will be cured of his cancer. I want to know that my seven-year-old daughter will never be sexually assaulted. I want my marriage to last a lifetime and that friends will not leave me.

That’s too much pressure to put on one movie. Sure, the Force Awakens will utilize practical effects and be shot on film and J. J. Abrams proved with Star Trek that he can revitalize a space-faring series, showing us through lens flares that anything is possible, but one movie cannot guarantee anyone’s future. Only a self-sacrificing god can do that.

Look at Jesus, a poor man of questionable parentage, who shook the political and religious leaders of his day with selfless answers and self-sacrifice. He exercised power to heal the sick and raise the dead. He spent time with children and touched lepers. His greatest teachings were about humility and self-denial. He showed us how to love the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and betrayers. He laid down his life for his friends and took it back up again. He died so that we may live.

I put my hope in Jesus, knowing he has a plan for my life, and if my uncle dies of cancer or my daughter is assaulted, if my marriage falls apart or my friends abandon me, even if my worst fears come true, Jesus will not leave me desolate. He is ever-present; his Spirit lives in me, which means he can work through me in power. I prayed for the sick, and they were healed. I was laid off with no prospects and got a better job. I was so overwhelmed with fear, I couldn’t make it through a day at school, and now I teach school. I messed up my leg so badly, I couldn’t walk without crutches, and now I run faster and farther than I ever could before.

Do I plan on taking my family to see the Force Awakens? We wouldn’t miss it, especially since we’ve sat down and watched the original trilogy together. I hope it affirms the story that light overcomes darkness, that we are not alone. Darth Vader may have died, but he laid down his life so his son would live, and he continues to live on.

Thanks to Jeff Muse, writer, park ranger, environmental educator, and cartographer of the outer life as well as the inner, for inviting me to participate in the My Writing Process blog tour. A fellow student at Ashland University’s MFA program, Jeff came alongside to cheer me on even as I ran up and down writing’s field of play with my helmet on backwards. Nobody writes with as much intentionality and grace as Jeff does. Seriously, check out www.jeffdarrenmuse.com.

As for me, aside from this blog, I’ve got a memoir exploring my development as a nerd that I’d like to be selected for publication, the beginning of a second work about my grandfather’s abandonment of his wife and five kids to start a cult out west, and an essay in progress about the insanity of my life as a runner, while an extensive list of other writing topics ties up my cloud storage. If anyone wants to pay me for my work, I’ll be happy to quit my job to write full time; just let me know.

I work in the realm of creative nonfiction, but the majority of my selections on Goodreads fall within the science fiction and fantasy genres, so I maintain an extensive vocabulary of geek speak and pop culture sensibility that permeates my work. No, I’ve not seen the latest episode of Game of Thrones, but I have read the books, so if you’d like to know what jaw-dropping event happens next, I’ll be happy to oblige.

I write what I do because I’m the person whose head contains so much useless crap if I don’t forge it into something of value, it gums up the works, and I can’t perform my roles as a teacher, husband, and father well. I’m a knowledge glutton, and if I don’t work off the excess calories, they weigh me down. I could do all this working in fiction, but I like the realness of nonfiction, the additional oomph because the stories dwell in truth. Writing in the genre challenges me even as it imparts wisdom, revealing details I’d not before considered.

If I leave my writing up to, “Oh, I’ll get to it after school or maybe after our kids are in bed,” it only gets done when there’s the rare external deadline. I’m a morning person with enough discipline to get up at 4:15 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 5:30 on Saturdays to run, so I figured I’d extend that model to the other three days of my work week for writing. Oh, don’t worry; coffee’s involved. After almost two months of this practice, I have yet to get three writing days in during the course of one week, but I’ve written more than ever before, uninterrupted and guilt-free.

Speaking of writing (effortless transition), allow me to introduce three friends who write utilizing the internets, who maintain a log on the world wide web, a weblog if you’d allow. I’ll just call them bloggers. They will be continuing the My Writing Process Blog Tour on April 28th.

First up, Jeff Mongold: A recent graduate of Ashland University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction program, he currently works at Hiram College in Northeast Ohio and is revising his first full-length manuscript, Living in Reverse: A Memoir. Jeff has been published in The Broken Plate and Kept Mistakes. His blog, Scrap Paper Vol 1 can be found at http://jwmongold.tumblr.com/.

Justin Bessler received his MFA in creative writing from Ashland University in 2012. He is currently working on a memoir and teaches as a community faculty instructor at Marion Technical College. He lives in Marion, Ohio, with his wife Crystal and their three children James, Olivia, and Miles. He wrote his first poem for his grandmother, who published it on her refrigerator, a popular place for reading material in the home. “Morning” marks his first poem published for a journal with a readership (much) greater than seven. His blog (currently in its fifth restart) is at justinbessler.com, where he intends to write about faith, family, writing, and other parts unknown

Kimberly Whitaker claims: I was born in the 80s. I grew up in the 90s. My most defining years were the 00s–the years that nobody knows how to reference. The thousands? The zeroes? The Oh-Ohs? Come on, America. Let’s standardize it.

I’ve only been into writing for six years or so (but I took a year hiatus after getting my MFA in creative nonfiction, so I guess 5?)

I took a creative writing class in college. I wasn’t very good. I’m not very good at writing poetry.

I started writing when I started teaching in Maryland. It started out when I would tell stories about what happened in my classroom that day (a reading quiz where a student seriously put that Roman Shakespeare performed his plays at Woodstock) or my latest misadventure in dating (He actually got so drunk he laid down on the pool table!). I was told that I had a natural ability to tell stories by my friend and colleague, Kelly. Kelly earned her MFA from Goucher College, and with me, shared pieces of her thesis about falling in love with the city of Baltimore and the men in it. I figured that I could write stories too.

I got my MFA from Ashland University. I’ve been dabbling here and there, but I’m ready to jump feet first back into writing.*

*Note: I’m very aware that I used a cliche to describe my new determination for writing. Leave your judgement at the door, reader.

I’m currently a high school English teacher in the outskirts of Pittsburgh. This is my 6th year of teaching. I think teaching and writing are very similar–you try something. It might turn out to be a dud; it might spark something brilliant. You just have to try a bunch of things to see what makes sense.

As a reformed robot, I feel a certain obligation — a call of duty, if you will — to tell you about my recent subroutine reboot. Via an extended weekend of video gaming, I lubricated the mechanized side of me, the intellectual who found more in common with Lt. Commander Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation than with my peers.

Friends think I play Xbox every day, but having two children younger than six means I spend my free time convincing my daughter to eat or tearing the house apart to find my son’s shoes, and when both kids are abed, I hang with the wife, finish up housework, or limp off to bed myself. Reality equals my booting up a video game every couple of weeks, so the rare gift of a weekend at my in-laws means while Grandma’s soaking up her grandkids, I’m soaking up digitized delight.

Some say a woman marries her father, and in my wife’s case, it’s true. Jerry’s a retired chemist; I’m a science teacher. We each own a slew of humorous t-shirts, but the only reason he’s seen more zombie movies and read more sci-fi novels than I is because he’s lived longer. Video games? They’re his full-time job.

When Jerry bought a bigger, better LCD-TV, instead of selling the old rear-projection television or moving it to a different room, he slid it four feet to the right. Now, as he’s earning his daily achievement in Halo: Reach, my mother-in-law reaches over to pat his leg while watching the Weather Channel. When we visit, I pack my Xbox One along with an overnight bag, enabling guaranteed gaming in the midst of the love maelstrom as Maggie travels from one new discovery to another with her grandmother, Asher redistributes the tiny container collection and the toy tribble, Jerry takes care of breakfast then consumes the daily paper, and my wife catches up with her parents. I visit as well, play with the kids, and walk with Jerry, but for the majority of the time, a controller nestles in my palms.

That’s how I took advantage of the Titanfall Beta. For the uninitiated, Titanfall is a military shooter in the vein of Battlefield, Call of Duty, or Halo where you fill the combat boots of a tough-as-nails soldier facing overwhelming odds. Instead of running around the map, ducking into buildings, and climbing stairs to gain the high ground, with Titanfall you can run along the sides of buildings and jump-jet your way onto second story roofs to rain fire from above; also there’s Titans. Instead of jumping into a tank or a jet when you tire of trading potshots along narrow corridors, you can call down a large, mechanized robotic suit from low orbit to reach objectives faster and squish any foot soldiers foolish enough to get in your way. In short, it’s a zombie movie-watching, sci-fi novel-reading, humorous t-shirt-wearing, science teacher’s dream game. I played and played and played and played.

Keep in mind, this was the beta version. Don’t rush out to your local Wal-Mart to find the game unstocked. Respawn Entertainment made a stripped-down version available to the public to test servers and flex muscles. They’ll release the full version on March 11th for Xbox One and PC with another iteration for the Xbox 360 sometime in June. Keep in mind, I only gain intangible rewards from this blog post: a happy man telling others why I’ve got such a big smile on my face.

Thanks to my wife who wants to see Guardians of the Galaxy together — she gets me; thanks to her parents for their hospitality and for enjoying our company almost as much as they enjoy their grandkids; and thanks to Vince Zampella who built Respawn Entertainment from the ground up to create the next summit of video game ascension. My circuits hum in anticipation.